Labour will justify the cost of living crisis, not solve it

The Labour Party has proposed a windfall tax on energy companies' excess profits, but they also want to intensify the sanctions on Russia that are to blame for the cost of living crisis.

Danger to pensioners

A windfall tax can backfire by discouraging investors and result in the energy companies raising prices even more. It can also take significant money away from pension funds that invest in the energy companies while expecting them to make significant profits, creating a danger to people's pensions and threatening the very people most at risk in cold winters.

Flipflopping mastery

Most importantly, flipflopping and moralistic posturing by Labour's leadership, and their lack of willingness to apologise for anything they do, equips them more to make excuses for a cost of living crisis than to solve one. It is more realistic that Labour will take action against people who talk about the cost of living crisis on social media and try to brand them as agents or fake accounts from Russia, rather than deal will the crisis itself.

Let's starve for Ukraine

The most realistic prediction of what a Labour government would do about the cost of living crisis is to talk at length about their windfall tax, fail to implement it in Parliament, blame the Tories, and then push for increased sanctions on Russia that will clearly worsen the cost of living crisis. Any increased sanctions on Russia, of course, will be implemented, as the imbecilic foreign policy handed to London by the demented halfwit in Washington is the only thing both sides in Parliament currently support.

In a Labour government, ministers would insist that supporting pointless Ukrainian and NATO confrontations with Russia is mandatory, and that costs of the war must be endured by everyone, even if they have to starve.

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US revealing a Saudi role in 9/11 only suggests a US role

News stories recently started covering an FBI disclosure of a connection between Saudi intelligence services, a Saudi national named Omar al-Bayoumi, and the hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The idea being asserted in such stories is that Bayoumi was undoubtedly a Saudi spy, and could have had advance knowledge of the oncoming suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

Suspicious timing of revelations

First of all, the US government may have cynically timed the revelations due to current problems in the relationship with Saudi Arabia. Numerous moves, or lack thereof, in support of United States foreign policy objectives, suggest the Saudis are losing interest in supporting Western strategic aims in the Middle East.

The United States is becoming increasingly frustrated by oil-producing nations' lack of interest in helping the West manage the price of oil its confrontation with Russia, one of the dominant oil-producing nations. This can be observed with the passing of the so-called NOPEC bill at the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, as the US hopes to sue OPEC members over oil prices. Such attempts probably coincide with other pressure tactics, with Saudi Arabia being a big target of American lawmakers right now.

A history of dark deeds and redactions

Before embracing the FBI's supposedly brave revelations about the truth of 9/11, people should consider that the information was redacted in the first place by the US government. In other words, the US government was actively concealing information about the possible chain of responsibility for 9/11 from the victims, while repudiating people for suggesting such concealment as conspiracy theorists.

It is almost certain that the US is still redacting additional information about 9/11, because such information is not convenient to them. The 9/11 Commission Report is thrown into doubt by these recent amendments to the story, and that is hardly a good look for the US government's credibility. 

What else will be amended about the story, in another 20 years? Will the families of victims ever actually know the truth, while they are alive?

The US government may have accidentally encouraged suspicions about its own potential murderous involvement in 9/11. Saudi defence and intelligence activities are so deeply connected with US defence and intelligence activities, dating back to the days of Operation Cyclone, when the US encouraged radical insurgents against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, that any Saudi involvement in 9/11 would point to possible US involvement in 9/11 as well.

Shifting blame for 9/11

Let us state once again, emphatically: the US government was the party redacting information about possible Saudi involvement. The US government, therefore, probably knew and still knows far more than it allowed the public to know. It hid, and is probably still hiding, the truth from the victims.

There was a time when alleging the Saudis 'did 9/11' would be outrageous. Now, that seems to be changing. It may simply be that Saudi Arabia did coordinate the 9/11 attacks, but what next? In another 20 years, further disclosures may show that US agents were leading Saudi agents in turn, thus placing responsibility for 9/11 with the US government, just as conspiracy theorists had claimed all along.

The US government has accused everyone of 'doing 9/11', except itself. Blame for 9/11 has always been used as a political device to attack people. Blame for 9/11 shifted over time from al-Qaeda, to Iraq, to Iran, to Saudi Arabia, and aggressive action always followed such blame. For people to suspect the US government of murdering its citizens on 9/11 is a normal thing, and for people to act aggressively on that suspicion is at least as reasonable as everything else that happened after 9/11.

If the information being released by the FBI leads to lawsuits alleging the Saudis carried out, or by failure of action caused, the mass murder of 9/11, it would be interesting to see the Saudi response. Did they themselves redact information incriminating US agents, and if US accusations become more serious, will they reveal such secrets in turn?

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Why refuse nuclear energy in a climate emergency?

Despite a recent U-turn, Germany's Green Party long opposed nuclear energy, holding this view even though nuclear power plants do not contribute to climate change. In the UK, the Scottish National Party (SNP) continues to reject nuclear energy.

There is a climate emergency, we are told. That means that we must radically change course immediately, or it will be too late.

Competing with other nations is hard to balance with saving the climate

The creation of an absolutely eco-friendly future, living fully in adherence to the philosophy of the environmentalists, is not something we actually have time for if we are in an emergency due to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming specifically. The idea of a grand new war of waste and economic competition by Western regimes and their ideological structures, against Russia and China, is not compatible with addressing a climate emergency.

In 2018, the United Nations was saying we have only until 2030 to avert an actual climate disaster (an event that will put serious strain on our countries, such as unprecedented refugees and threatening food shortages). The idea that the West can focus on eliminating energy dependence on Russia and economic reliance on China (that means accommodating an explosion of dirty industry and energy to accomplish such goals and waging conflicts throughout the world), and at the same time avert a climate disaster, is folly. Food shortages alone will be completely unmanageable, when added to the potential loss of a third of the world's wheat supply due to conflict in Ukraine.

If the West is going green, it is not going to defeat Russia or China in time to make the switch. At this point, hegemony really is incompatible with survival. Once a climate disaster really starts to have serious consequences, it is clear where all the world's refugees will be heading (the European Union and the United States). It would be game over for the Western side in this "Cold War" at that moment, as the West will be swamped by these refugees and unable to even feed them, perhaps being forced to beg for food aid from those we labelled as enemies.

Is it a lie?

Many reading the above would probably like to interject by saying that the barrage of contradicting statements (there is this climate emergency, yet we must wage this war of waste, and yet also we can scrap nuclear power stations even though they are not adding to that emergency and in fact mitigate it), means a major lie is being told somewhere. Many conspiracy theorists will probably reject the idea that there is a climate emergency at all, because of so many contradictions.

The consensus of the world's governments and the international panels of experts compels us to accept the reality of a climate emergency, whereas only a few would have us adopt declarations that conflict with this reality. Clearly, political partisans are interfering with a united response to the emergency, dependent as they are on having something to debate about.

The position of the German Greens up until their U-turn was absurd. They agreed with the idea of a climate emergency, yet they wanted to sabotage the response to it by trying to hobble our efforts to stop it, by condemning nuclear energy. They likely agree that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is a dirty and polluting process, yet they want to buy the resulting American LNG so that they can avoid gas supplies from Russia. So, what looks like a commitment to save the Earth quickly crumbles in the halls of power, replaced with familiar and ugly realpolitik.

Is the SNP's continued rejection of nuclear energy in the UK more acceptable than some, because the SNP desires independence for Scotland and Scotland likely has enough energy sources to support its small population without any nuclear plants? Yes, but someone who is truly concerned about a global warming emergency, believing we only have eight years left to solve it, would likely still want to generate nuclear energy and sell it to their neighbours, to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

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